ABSTRACT
The ethnographic sensibility characteristic for their later transatlantic work is, in fact, already present in a number of photofilms which were commissioned from Mau and Fichte by German television stations, sympathetic to formal experimentation in the latter part of the 1960s. Whilst stills and moving images are at the centre of the discipline of visual anthropology, the hybrid practice of photofilm hardly has received attention, and few have explored the genre practically or theoretically so far. Haviland's photofilm was made digitally from analogue stills initially not intended for the purpose, but which post hoc turned out to be very congenial to this genre, and in fact in this way reveal more than as single images. Blau’s photofilm, finally, arrests the seamless unfolding of a religious ceremony, to allow the viewer to come “in-between” and “within” an otherwise unremitting ritual.
